Drugs: a life of their own
Nicholas McGeorge writes about the global problem of illegal drugs
My interest in illegal drugs policy began when I went to work as a psychologist in the English prison service in 1974. Other influences have been meeting with Bolivian Quakers whose farmhouses had been stripped by the army looking for cocaine laboratories, seeing thousands of women in prison for drug offences in Bangkok, going to Mexico for a justice conference, and attending UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice meetings since 1991 and UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs meetings since 2014. It became a concern for me in 2001.
The global drug problem
It was April. I was standing in a two-hour queue in New York to get a photo ID card so I could attend the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the global drug problem. I talked to the man next to me, who was the head of customs for a West African country. His job, he told me, was to stop drugs coming into the country. ‘But I am not given the resources to do it.’ I responded by commenting: ‘So you need to be a magician.’ ‘Yes,’ he said.
His answer confirmed for me what I had seen and read over the years. The war on drugs was both futile and harmful. The futility can be illustrated by a contribution made at a meeting called by local Quakers in Cornwall in 2011 that I attended to discuss drugs policy reform. A woman reported that she had asked her twenty-one-year-old daughter to check how quickly she and her friends could buy illegal drugs locally. The answer came back: ‘Twenty minutes.’
The harm is shown in a statement made at UNGASS by senator Roberto Gil Zuarth, the president of the senate in the Mexican government. He said: ‘Prohibition has made criminal organisations too rich to handle.’
His remark reminded me of the time when I was a speaker at a conference on reforming the justice system in Guanajuato State in Mexico in 2009. The state was said to be a quiet one for illegal drugs. Two weeks after I left, a state prosecutor emailed me to say that criminal drug gangs had shot up a police station and a town hall.
Money
The money from illegal drugs has also funded and continues to fund armed rebellions against national governments. The Shining Path movement in Peru eventually negotiated a peaceful settlement, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) have just completed negotiations for peace with the Colombian government and the Taliban are still vigorously carrying out armed attacks in Afghanistan. The UN reports that Afghanistan is now the world’s largest supplier of heroin and recently developed a large market in marijuana.
When the Taliban launched their armed attack in the country, they initially abolished the poppy harvest. But, in order to keep funding their war, they changed their mind.
In a study on Heroin Addiction and the British System: Volume 1 published in 2005, there is this reference in the section on Northern Ireland: ‘Several paramilitary organisations are believed to have benefited financially from international drug dealing but all have maintained a strong “anti-drugs stance” within Northern Ireland.’
The ‘war on drugs’
Internationally, governments have cooperated on efforts to reduce the use of the illegal drugs since the founding of the League of Nations in 1920 and its replacement by the United Nations in 1945.
The first use of the term ‘war on drugs’ was by president Richard Nixon in 1969. One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal, John Ehrlichmann, said the ‘war on drugs’ was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to an interview made over twenty years ago but only published for the first time in March this year, in Harper’s Magazine.
‘The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people,’ he said. ‘We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.’
Ehrlichman said: ‘We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.’
One in three
One of the effects of the ‘war’ can be seen in Durham, North Carolina, where my American wife and I have a home. A year ago the senior judge for Durham told me that half the police budget was spent on drug enforcement. African-Americans are arrested more frequently than European Americans, despite their illegal drug use being lower.
And then there are the people arrested as a result of the ‘war’. Currently, about one in three inmates in English prisons are there because of drug related crimes. An official report found that more prisoners come out of prison as heroin addicts than go in. This year half the inmates in US federal prisons are in for drug related crimes – that is around 250,000 people.
One of the saddest sights I have ever seen was the 4,000 women in the Bangkok women’s prison that I visited in 2005. All but a hundred of them were guilty of drug offences. During the day they sat at bench tables, in open sheds, with most having nothing to do. There were 28,000 women prisoners in Thailand in 2005. There are 44,000 now.
Money laundering
Another effect of the ‘war’ is money laundering the income from the illegal drug trade. In 2012 the US fined HSBC Bank (one of the world’s largest banks) nearly two billion dollars – $1,900,000,000 – for doing just that.
Prescription drugs, such as amphetamines, are being diverted into the illegal market. For example, a Saudi crown prince was arrested last November in the Lebanon just as he was about to fly out of that country in his own aircraft to Saudi Arabia with two tons of the drug.
I have come round to thinking that the world drugs issue has a life of its own as a global industry, providing employment and funding for criminal justice systems, health services, academic departments, NGOs, pharmaceutical companies, customs services, laboratories, banks and criminals. There has been little or no reduction in illegal drug use after ninety years of effort. And this is despite the fact that the UN Conventions about drug control are considered the best examples of international cooperation between governments.
I finish with this extract from the Quaker statement presented at UNGASS:
Quakers’ historical experience of imprisonment for their non-conforming religious beliefs, and their understanding that ‘the Inner Light of God’ is present in all people, have given Quakers a strong concern about the care of people held in custody.
One early expression of this concern was their founding of the world’s first modern mental hospital, The Retreat, in England in 1796, and which is still in operation.
The Retreat was the first institution to treat mentally ill people humanely, giving them the loving care they needed to recover. Today, Quakers consider that drug dependent people need health and social care, not imprisonment.
Further information: http://bit.ly/CareNotCustody
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